Fictoid from out West

Matthew LaClair is a student at Eugene Lang College.  He attended Jeff’s course this semester on Democracy in America.   He is also a radio correspondent for WBAI in NYC. He sends in this report of a fictoid from the Heartland.

I received the following chain e-mail from a relative of mine. I thought of it as a good example of dangerous fictoids, because after I checked the story out, I found it has simply never happened. Here, read the unedited text of the e-mail:

Thought  for the day: 

Calling an illegal alien an ‘undocumented immigrant’ is like calling a drug dealer an ‘unlicensed pharmacist’

.

Have you ever wondered why good stuff never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, or ABC news………an 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended her home, and herself….

…against two murderous, illegal immigrants…

…and she wins, She is still alive.

Now that is Gun Control!

BUTTE, MONTANA

Shotgun preteen vs.  Illegal alien Home Invaders:
 Butte, Montana November 5,  2009

Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26,  probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home. 

It seems  the two crooks never learned two things:


 1 – They were in Montana 


2 – Patricia has been a clay shooting champion since she was nine.

 Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father’s room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.

 Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor and was the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old’s knee crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.

 When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive.

 It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber handgun he had taken from another home invasion robbery. The victim of that robbery, 50-year-old David 0Burien, was not so lucky. He died from stab wounds to the chest.

I like this kind of e-mail.

American citizens defending themselves and their homes.

And here is what I wrote in response to the email.
:

I can tell you exactly why this never made the mainstream news. 

Most of the major networks such as NBC, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, etc. report on news. I.E. things that actually happened.

 Read this story from the Montana Standard:

A dramatic story about a shooting that supposedly happened in Butte last year is nothing more than an urban myth.
 The bogus story has been circulating for the past year on Internet blogs and Web sites concerning a girl shooting two men who broke into her Butte home in November 2006. 
According to the fabricated story, an 11-year-old Butte girl shot two “illegal aliens” with a shotgun after they broke into her home. The shooting supposedly took place on Nov. 5, 2006, according to Internet posts.
 When asked about the authenticity of the events described in this story, Butte-Silver Bow Sheriff John Walsh told The Montana Standard in an earlier interview that his office never investigated such an incident. 
“This never happened,” Walsh said.
 The story claims the girl shot and killed the two intruders while she was home alone. The story doesn’t provide a street address or attribute the information to any official sources.
 Walsh brushed off the story of an urban myth. 
“It’s amazing how these things get around,” he said.
 Numerous people from all over the United States have contacted The Montana Standard in the past year via e-mail or phone to verify if the story was true. The story is often given the headline “Home Invasion Gone Wrong.”  A recent search for this story on the Internet search engine Google.com returned with more than 400 hits. 
The story has been printed as fact on some anti-gun control and anti-immigration Web sitesricia Harrington, who shoots and kills the two “illegal aliens” identified as Ralphel Resindez and Enrico Garza.